From: Garance A Drosehn Date: 2006-04-30T09:44:20+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby for command line applications On 4/26/06, Alan M wrote: > Hi, > > I am a Linux administrator and I use Perl for scripting. > I do not develop any web applications. My programs are command line > tools. > > At this phase I am thinking to upgrade my programming language to either > Python or Ruby. I started to use perl for scripting maybe 10 to 12 years ago, when I finally decided that I was trying to force 'awk' to do things it was never meant to do. I wrote a lot of useful sysadmin-type programs in perl (reading log files, summarizing data, etc). But many of those scripts were written in bits-and-pieces. I start out needing a 3-line perl script for some simple task. Then a week later I need to add something else. Then I realize I could use the same script on two different log files if I just made a few more changes. Before long, my initial 3-line perl script is up around 700 lines. And, well, it's a mess. It's a mess because it was never designed to be a 700-line program, it was built up a few dozen lines at a time, over many weeks or months. When doing the same kind of scripts in ruby, I found that I do a much better job of re-factoring the program as I added more features to it, or as I found out that the data I needed to process looks nothing like I was told it was going to look like. I *could* write a good perl script if I started out with a fixed goal, and stuck to whatever that original goal was, but that almost never happens to me... I used to do some Objective-C programming under NeXTSTEP, and I found that the object-oriented support in ruby fits very well with how my mind thinks. I've looked over python a few times, and I know some excellent sysadmins who use python for their work, but python just never quite caught my interest. I'm not sure why. The usual complaint about python is the whitespace-requirements that it has, and actually that does not bother me at all. But for some reason I found ruby much more compelling to the way that I think than I found python to be. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = drosihn@gmail.com Senior Systems Programmer or gad@FreeBSD.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy, NY; USA